Tag Archives: countryside

The snow swirls and curls outside the window, I cock my head and watch it gracefully move in the late afternoon sun. Its presence is soft, muted, and gentle as it winnows through the straight streets and tall buildings of New York’s Upper East Side. By tomorrow morning, the city will be covered in a deep snow.

Being from the Snow Belt of Northeastern Ohio, snow is a winter inevitability—its manifestation involving salted roads and large expanses of forest and farmland, covered in a cold sea of solid white. But this is my first urban snowstorm. The first time I’ll seen snow embrace the busy, lived-in world of a big city.

I look away from the window and back to the laptop that sits on my lap. On a small side table to my left, is a hot cup of tea, Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth, and a glass of sweet Ohio red wine. I always bring back a few bottles of sweet Ohio red wine when I visit my family in the Midwest. I’ve yet to find a red wine that matches its tasty contradictions: light-bodied but rich, delicately sweet but sensuously grounded. But at this moment, I enjoy not for its contradictions, but for the sense of consistency its ruby presence gives me. Though buildings rather than trees tower outside my window, my snow rituals haven’t changed that much. In Northeastern Ohio, I too would weather out a snowy afternoon with a cup of tea, a good book, an interesting writing project, and a glass of sweet Ohio red wine.

Inspired, I hold my glass up to the window and absently swirl around its contents. The wine seems to be dancing with the snow. What a mismatched couple they seem to make: Red and white, liquid and solid, town and country, all moving before my eyes. But are they really so poorly matched? For even in contradiction there is consistency. Won’t this snow melt, evaporate, and rain down upon the vineyards of the Hudson Valley, or even those of Northeastern Ohio, depending on the weather patterns? Won’t future clusters of grapes benefit from this snow’s liquid nurturance, and swell full of flavor and life? And won’t a Midwestern girl enjoy an afternoon of snow, even if her landscape is tall, squared buildings rather than expansive, rolling farmland?

I look around, my brother is already back with the horses. And my friend, who runs the farm I am currently spending time at, has important paperwork-like things to do. Slowly, I breath out.

“I guess I will.”

I take the white Styrofoam carryout box, containing the leftover French fries from our lunch plates, and make my way to a small barn. On its threshold, I unlatch the main stall gate and enter a world incensed by animal musk and sweet straw.

“Hey guys.”

I nod to an unblinking Alpine goat. When I turn to close the gate behind me, a grey haired donkey nuzzles my hip. With my free hand, I stroke his mane, tufted and wild.

“Sorry love, this isn’t for you.”

I pass by the goat and the friendly donkey, slipping between an iron gate and a wooden stall. I hear a delighted squeal and feel an eager prodding at my ankles. Taking another deep breath, I look down.

“Hey Lola, I’ve got something for you.”

She prods at my ankle again and I flinch. Her touch is concentrated and hard. I hope that I don’t bruise. Why did I agree to feed the pig? I’m afraid of pigs.

I first discovered this fear in college, during a spring break trip to a Heifer Project farm outside of Boston. The farm had two large hogs, who would eat everything from donuts to vegetables, and those two large hogs needed to go to the butcher’s. My classmates and I stood in two lines from pen to truck, behind thick boards that we fortified with our body weight. We hoped that the hogs would go quietly, but if they didn’t, only our body weight on the boards would keep the hogs from getting away—and us, from being trampled.

Shaking behind the board I braced, I realized that I was afraid. Pigs have a low center of gravity, are usually very muscular, and have one-track minds. Woe to those who get between them and their comfortable pen or their dinner of donuts. In order to meet their needs, to survive, they wouldn’t mind trampling you.

Or, in the case of Lola, bruising your ankles.

I stoop down and put my free hand on Lola’s nose.

“That’s enough, my girl.”

Surprisingly, she stops.

I sit on the straw and spread a handful of French fries in front of Lola. She snorts them up and then eagerly looks back up at me for more. Her actions are playful and energetic, almost dog-like. It isn’t long before the Styrofoam carryout box is empty.

Though Lola is finished with her snack, she isn’t finished with me. She turns around, carefully backing her stout little pig butt onto my lap. We sit together as I absently run my fingers along the black and white bristles on her back. Perhaps it isn’t pigs that I’m afraid of after all. Perhaps what makes me leery of them is their tendency to trample anything and everything to get what they want. Pigs can be dangerously selfish, but, as Lola is currently showing me, not all pigs are prone to bad behavior brought on by greed and desire.

And if I’m being honest in my musings, selfishness isn’t restricted to the actions of pigs.

I went to graduate school at a well-respected research university. Though my colleagues were not pigs, some of them had a tendency to show pig-like behavior in the presence of tenure-track positions, publishing deals, and eligible mates. I had to brace myself mentally and physically and politically from time to time, just so I wouldn’t get trampled in the name of someone else’s desires. And though I was strong and braced myself well, I was always very afraid.

No, it isn’t pigs that I fear. It’s the behavioral tendencies they’ve come to represent in my life. Thank goodness there is Lola though, whose sturdy little form feels like comfort and redemption and new beginnings as we sit in her stall filled with straw.

Note: The farm where the above took place is called Sand Hill Stable. It’s a beautiful horse stable and farm located in the outskirts of the Ohio Western Reserve. If you ever need to board horses in the area, or just want to visit a beautiful jewel of Northeastern Ohio countryside, contact the marvelous stable manager.

A backyard full of large rounds of wood, deer grazing on clover beside a graffitied wall, a blue tent sitting among the not yet decomposed autumn leaves: I see the strangest things from the windows of trains. Perhaps I get to see these intimate and odd images because the people, the landscapes, the animals, right outside my window forget that I’m looking. Trains move fast. Plus, it’s easy to miss things when books and electronics and conversations distract you.

This month for HartfordFAVS, I get to write about one of these strange window encounters. Who would have thought that a blue tent, sitting in the quiet of deep winter, still among autumn’s leaves, would make me think of how God chooses to show us presence in our daily lives.

It was all going to be so Spiritually Moving. That was before a damp, five hour walk through the English countryside. Instead of arriving at her destination, an abandoned Victorian church, full of poetry and prayers, Paula arrived moist and cursing. The church was not the majestic Gothic ruin the travel section of the New York Times reported it to be. Barely a tracing of walls and roof, it was a sublime disappointment. Clover covered the ground where pews and floors used to be and thickets of blackberries tumbled over a cracked, multi-angled display of rock and rubble, all that remained of the altar.

And there, waddling through the jagged stones was a rabbit. Lop-eared, furry, and brown, it reached out its silky neck to bite off one the berries, voluptuously swollen by many days of rain.

Paula saw it and snorted. A rabbit grazing in the foundations of a church seemed to be further proof of the Englishman’s godlessness. Like this pathetic non-structure, the church she attended in London was void of life, including peckish rabbits. When she showed up for Mass on Sundays, the rector, abandoning his stereotypical English reserve, would sprint down the main aisle to meet her: He is starting a young person’s reading group. Would she be interested? Would she be willing to bring some of her American university mates?

A rabbit grazing in the foundations of a church seemed to be further proof of the Englishman’s godlessness.

If Paula wanted to see the hearts of the English moved by something greater than themselves, she nipped down to her neighborhood’s pub after Sunday service. There, she found men and women clustered around flat-screen tellies, watching the local football match. She often heard the tune “A Mighty Fortress is Our God,” robustly accompanying a good-natured exploration of Player A’s sexual prowess or Team X’s lack thereof.

Paula sighed. She missed being in a crowded church where people sang hymns instead of football songs. She missed a God that she could recognize.

Thunder rumbled. Exasperated, she looked up into the graying sky. If she tarried much longer, the five-hour walk back to her Bed & Breakfast would be in a downpour. She departed, her heavy steps carelessly treading on twigs and sod. There were no churches here.

The rabbit, usually frightened by loud noises, did not notice Paula’s departure. Back tensed and rigidly arched, it crouched on the altar’s remains, laboriously expelling tiny droplets of excrement.

In one of those droplets was a cluster of blackberry seeds.

As the rain began to fall, the seeds sunk deep into the soil, blessing the loam with the promise of new life.